Chocolate and Blackness

Silke Hackenesch, Dr. phil., ist Amerikahistorikerin an der Universität Kassel.

1. Exploring the Entanglements of Chocolate and Blackness In January 2006, Ray Nagin, then mayor of New Orleans, caused quite a furor with a statement he made at a meeting to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Participants in the meeting were intending to discuss the reconstruction of the city, which hurricane Katrina had devastated on August 29 the year before. Nagin expressed his wish for New Orleans to remain a "Chocolate City," that is with a majority of African-American residents: "We ask black people: it's time. It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way; it wouldn't be New Orleans." According to Nagin's statement, New Orleans before Katrina was a "Chocolate City," that is, a city largely made up of African-American resi-dents. The white minority of New Orleans, which-for a brief moment-had become a majority after the hurricane, protested heavily. Understand-ing Nagin's use of "people from Uptown" as a coded reference for well-to-do Euro-American residents (although the area is in fact very diverse), they felt unwelcomed and accused the mayor of racism. Interestingly, Nagin's reference to God in his speech ("It's the way God wants it to be.") was less cause for irritation or protest. Instead, the white, mostly middle-class residents, as well as members of the black community, and even the national mainstream media chose to focus their criticism and attention to Nagin's wish for a "Chocolate City." A couple of months after Nagin's controversial speech, during the soccer World Cup in Germany in the summer of 2006, the Ivorian Bourse du Café et du Cacao (BCC) introduced the chocolate bar Le Chocolat du Planteur to the British, French, and German markets. The TV commercial as well as the print advertisement featured Didier Drogba, a star player on the national soccer team of Ivory Coast, where the chocolate is manufactured from Ivorian cocoa beans. In the TV spot, Drogba is apparently nude, and the viewer only sees naked body parts. His dark skin is glistening, as if he had been dipped in chocolate, or as if he was made from chocolate. Drogba dribbles a ball that, upon contact with his body, turns into chocolate. When he aims to score, the football splinters into hundreds of chocolate pieces and a shot of Drogba's face reveals that instead of drops of sweat, chocolate drops are running down his temples. How are these seemingly unrelated examples connected to each other? What do they share? Both examples establish a direct link between choco-late and blackness, albeit in very different ways and in different cultural registers. Both raise the question of why it seems to be utterly logical and "natural" for people to equate chocolate with blackness. What does chocolate have to do with the United States, specifically with African-American culture? Why is chocolate such a popular metaphor in the construction of blackness in various spheres of (popular) culture? Why are metaphors for edibility, such as chocolate, honey, and cinnamon, metaphors that also work as sexual allusions, used in reference to blackness? Why has the advertising industry chosen to portray black bodies in order to promote this sweet treat, and what does this have to do with cocoa as a historically colonial commodity? The answers to these questions form the contents of this book. In the analysis that follows, I want to explore why the mythical con-nection between blackness and chocolate is so powerful, why it seems so "natural" and convincing to use chocolate as a coded reference to gen-dered blacknesses, whether in advertisements, in literature, in music, or in scientific racism, colorism, and popular discourses on race. The fact that there have not yet been any studies that explore this cultural phenomenon or dedicate extensive analyses to the functions of signifiers such as choco-late-or ebony, coffee, etc.-further confirms the convincing power and the seeming "naturalness" of the myth. It is so pervasive and plausible, and produces such a high degree of "truth," that it is difficult to literally see through. Yet this common cultural practice is worthy of analysis for it reveals how blackness is constructed, performed, and perceived. Moreover, I argue that one cannot understand the history of chocolate without understanding its relationship to Western representations of blackness. Indeed, tracing the complex transnational and imperial movements of chocolate as a commodity offers new insights into the modern racial formations of blackness. It also sheds light on the differences in black cultural and political expressions across the African Diaspora. Whereas black Europeans decry white Europeans' fetishization of blackness through food items, African Americans often embrace the same logic of naming by referring to their own color differences through food metaphors. The first case is an example of Othering through racial naming, whereas the second example serves as a (potentially affirmative) self-reference. This work is a cultural history of the entanglements of chocolate and blackness. It follows the material traces, routes, semantics, and discourses of cocoa and chocolate through various times, places, cultural spaces, and genres. It looks at chocolate and blackness from different angles: a material analysis that takes the production process of cocoa into account and that pays special attention to slavery and colonialism; an exploration of the semantics of chocolate and its visual representations in European and US advertisements; as well as a discursive analysis of the connections between cocoa and race in various (African) American spheres of cultural production. Furthermore, this book explores not only the cultural associations of chocolate and its imaginative potential, but also link these to the heavily sexualized discourses on black corporeality. I am arguing that a sensualized discourse on chocolate as an aphrodisiac merged at certain points with a sexualized discourse on racialized black bodies, producing a complicated web of desire, appropriation, and coercion in which cocoa, chocolate, and blackness are key elements. In order to map the variety and versatility of this significations, the chapters maintain a dynamic perspective and delve into different spaces and contexts in which blackness and chocolate interlock. The book has five different focal points: this introduction explores the semantics of chocolate and its many associations. Chocolate's origins in Mesoamerican culture fueled a variety of positive meanings attached to chocolate, which in turn enforced the phenomenal success of this sweet food in many industrialized nations. Had chocolate not evolved into such a popular food in the consuming countries, it could not have gained rele-vance as a classed, gendered, and racialized signifier. Subsequently, this chapter conceptualizes chocolate as a myth and as a racial signifier for blackness. Chapter 2 explores the modes of production of cocoa, high-lighting how these are entangled in unequal (post)colonial power relations, which were critically discussed in the early twentieth century, as soon as chocolate began to turn into a mass commodity. These labor conditions in the harvesting of cocoa found their way, albeit in a distorted way, into the visual representations in chocolate advertisements that will be analyzed in Chapter 3. This iconography often enforces chocolate's connection to plantation labor, brown-skinned peoples, as well as the pleasure of con-suming it. Chapter 4 looks at the sexualization of chocolate, its historical context, and how these fantasies of sensual indulgence in chocolate are not only promoted in ...